And although most of our athletes think I take vacations about once a month, I actually am still working, just not with them. Last week I was asked to speak at an event in Chicago for the National Strength and Conditioning Associations Youth Fitness Symposium. I spoke about our athletes (bragged really), and then demonstrated how we use the TRX Suspension Training System to assist in the early stages of strength development.
Here is an article from Northwestern University on the event.
Athletic destinies determined by age 10
by Brad Stenger
Sep 29, 2010
NSCA_YouthFitnessSymposium
LeBron James was ten years old once. By that age he was on his way to becoming the LeBron James we know today, and he was helped by playing football, according to expert trainers who agree that a range of play activities between age six and 10 helps build a broad base of athletic motor and coordination abilities.
Each year hundreds of kids come through Scott Moody’s AthleteFit facility outside Kansas City, and dozens of them finish high school with collegiate sports scholarships.
“If [kids] don’t develop those manipulative motor skills at that age, that 6-10 window, then they don’t have the confidence necessary to participate,” said Moody. As a result, their overall fitness goes down, further dropping confidence. “It’s this downward spiral that most people never come out of.”
Moody joined more than 100 trainers from across the U.S. and Canada at a recent National Strength and Conditioning Association Youth Training Symposium in Chicago. They discussed how in an overweight yet sports-obsessed culture trainers are making a difference in how kids get started in athletics.
Patrick McHenry, a high school strength coach in Castle Rock, Colo., talked about a tall, strong basketball player who could shoot and who looked like he might be great, but as a senior he lacked footwork.
“Was it too late? Yes, for him.” McHenry said. “If we had had him during his sophmore or junior year we could have helped him, but would he have been the best? No.”
Rick Howard, director of athletics for the School District of Philadelphia, gets requests from teachers and coaches for lowest-common-denominator training programs to meet the needs of, say, a third-grade physical education class or a girls’ softball team.
“It’s not that easy,” he tells them. “You really have to know everybody on that team, what they’re good at, what they’re not good at.” Mostly he sees sports instruction and training for kids that winds up reinforcing what they’re already good at, “Kids that are fast, keep them running.”
Reinforcement has run amok in cases where young athletes are opting to specialize in one sport at a young age. In the worst cases, according to McHenry, they run the risk of overuse injuries.
“We find they’re missing their window to all of those motor skills that are going to help them athletically later in the game,” said Moody.
“Girls’ soccer players have trouble tracking the ball in the air,” he pointed out, “because they never played volleyball growing up, they never played softball growing up. They didn’t get used to tracking objects out of the air.”
Mike Nitka is an editor for the trainers’ association journal and a Wisconsin high school wrestling coach. Motor skills in older people, he said, “can be developed, but not at the highest level possible because Mother Nature is trying to give us the biggest assist possible, and these are the windows” for that.
“I have a sign in my office,” Nitka said, “Volleyball players play volleyball. Athletes play anything they want.”
Scott,
How does one explain other countries, especially South America, where the kids only play one sport… soccer? The girls not being able to track a ball because they didn’t play softball doesn’t get past my sniff test. Although it can’t hurt to play another sport, I doubt Messi or Xavi played softball or baseball or anything else for that matter.
Nitka’s sign is great… but I don’t think it pertains to soccer players. Athletes that play soccer only play in the U.S., the special players play everywhere else.
I’d love to get your thoughts.
Good points, and they are all valid. This article excerpt was not able to capture my entire presentation, and the quotes from me were inserted by the author to flow with the other speakers quotes and the theme of the article he was writing.
In my presentation, I elaborated on this quite extensively. You are correct, but your points about Messi or Xavi actually prove my point, and that is players need to develop skills at a young age. I promise you, Messi worked (played) with a ball much more between the ages of 6-10 than 99% of the youth in this country. In the countries that you speak of, there is so much more implicit (or unorganized) learning going on at a young age in regards to developing soccer skill, by the time the player gets into an organized training atmosphere they have so much “natural” ability or skill embedded into their game, they have built such a broad foundation, they understand, and are so much more instinctive than other players, that their game becomes much more natural and beautiful than the game of my 10 year old daughter that practices 1x per week and plays games on the weekend.
The point the speakers were driving home in this article was centered on “play” and not “training.” They wanted kids to “play” more, and not think that 2 practices a week is all the play/training you need to do. My point about playing softball, is this… If the only time you ever touch a soccer ball is at practice, and in practice/games there are very few balls thrown, kicked, punted into the air, until age 11-12, how much experience do you get tracking balls in the air (how many reps do you get in a given session/game)? Right! Not too many… However, girls that also played volleyball, or softball, seem to have a more instinctive, reactive ability to track balls in the air. Not because they played softball/volleyball, but because the HAVE actually tracked balls in the air! The other girls HAVE NOT. I, by no means, was saying that playing softball would make you a better soccer player, I was just stating that it seemed to better develop this specific skill.
So, you are absolutely right. If you want to be great at soccer, play soccer…every day… but play, learn, create, develop, etc. Expose yourself to every situation, thousands of times in fun, play oriented activities that you create with your friends because it is what YOU want to do. Then you have a much better chance of becoming great.